Hello,

On our server, we have 4 nic ports and out of that we've created 2 separate network bonds. I know there is an option to specify a primary 'ie. primary=eth0', but is there a way to force a primary interface in each bond?

Watching on our cisco switches, its constantly flapping and shows the bond interface as 2 mac addresses because we haven't specified a primary nic in the bond. I assume the switch is confused and both mac addresses are fighting to become the primary interface of the bond? We're running in active-backup by the way and running RHEL4 AS4 (Update 5).

Thanks...

We use mode=balance-tlb and I haven't used active-backup, but...
I would think you can set the primary for each bond in your modprobe.conf file
like this:

alias bond0 bonding
options bond0 max_bonds=2 mode=active-backup miimon=100 primary=eth0
alias bond1 bonding
options bond1 max_bonds=2 mode=active-backup miimon=100 primary=eth2

Of course your ifcfg-eth0,1,2,3 would need to be modified appropriately to specify which nics are used for which bonds
ex:
device=eth0
userctl=no
onboot=yes
master=bond0
slave=yes
bootproto=none
type=ethernet

device=eth2
userctl=no
onboot=yes
master=bond1
slave=yes
type=ethernet

Hope this helps.